The vertical distance she covered via rope was big enough to significantly cut back on her route back out of that hellhole. It was still several hours of running and near misses before she staggered out of the catacombs, ready to collapse, but it was much shorter than she'd anticipated.
"Light!" She switched off her headtorch and made goblin-like scrabbling motions with her hands towards the overcast orange sky. "Fresh air! Open spaces!" A wind stirred a shower of sand and blasted it in her face. Her hair flared. "I didn't miss the sand. They've still got plenty of that down there."
She took a deep breath anyway. It smelt like hot sand, fumes, and sweat. She was so happy.
She was also probably still being chased, so it was time to stop dawdling and get back to the Ark Angel. But she took a moment to smile, at least. Smile and enjoy not being trapped in some horror maze with man-eating, mind-controlling bugs everywhere—
Alright, that was a good enough incentive to get out of here. Time to go.
The burn injury on her side roared its displeasure, aggravating and sizzling with every step she took. It had got worse the last few hours—was it infected? Her mother would have known, but Aphra had never been that kind of doctor. She preferred studying things that would take the body apart, not fix it. As far as she was concerned, if bacta couldn't do the job, no number of years in med school could.
But it hurt like hell. So, yeah. Get back to the ship, slap some bacta on it, and hope that did the job.
The ship, thankfully, was exactly where she'd left her. She wasn't sure what she'd been concerned about, considering it seemed that the droids and their horror queen preferred to dwell in the dark of the catacombs, but Luke had been pretty intent on killing her to preserve the secret of their ascendancy. Maybe they'd have snuck up here and sabotaged her ship somehow to keep her from running far.
…that wasn't out of the question, yet.
She shouted the voice command to unlock the landing ramp—come to think of it, Luke's voice was still coded to work for that; she should remove him—and jogged up into the hold. Her side still protested vociferously, but not now, not now, not now!
When she got to the cockpit, she threw herself into the pilot's chair and ran every diagnostic the Ark Angel was capable of. And she was the one who'd modified her—it was capable of a lot.
Slowly, painstakingly, each one came up green. Her baby was fine.
A sigh hissed out between her teeth.
Next step, then. Get the hell off the planet, so she couldn't be targeted by the droids at a later date. She could wait for Vader in low orbit just as well.
The Ark Angel lifted off as smoothly as ever. More evidence that she hadn't been tampered with. Aphra plotted a trajectory to take her up just beyond the atmosphere and lock them into a temporary orbit, then sat back to let the navicomputer cruise them along. That was when she looked out the viewport.
Dots moved along the sands below her, almost like ants from this height. The desert had been full of dots on the way in, she remembered. Up close, they were corpses left behind when the planet had died. She knew that. That wasn't the bit that concerned her.
The dots before hadn't been moving.
She frowned and peered closer, pulling out her binocs. The Ark Angel had a holocam system—something that was also useful in cases of suspected sabotage!—and she zeroed that in on the knot of moving dots too, expanding the image until it was something recognisable.
Droids, of all shapes and sizes. Some of them seemed to be the droids she'd set fire to hours before, with blackened and slightly wobbled carapaces, while others were the big tough ones with rocket launchers for fists, and the others were a thousand designs in-between. She wished she'd had the time to explore the droid factory more. So many interesting designs to judge and steal!
Were they out here alone? It was possible, but…
She focused her binocs. There—a glint of blond hair against the reddish sand gave him away. They clustered around Luke, almost shielding him from the sun and her gaze, but not quite. He was kneeling on the ground, something round and yellow-green cradled in his hands like a newborn child. She tried to zoom in further, but her binocs were at their limit.
With a huff of frustration, she switched to the holocam feed from the Ark Angel's cams, the holo projecting from the console. It zoomed in further, but by now Luke's hands were empty. At least the droids stepped back, then; it gave her a better view of what Luke was kneeling next to.
It was a Geonosian corpse. Luke's hands were on either side of its head, doing… something… before he drew back, dusted off his trousers, and stood up again.
Then he looked up.
He must have heard the Ark Angel before then. Her engine was loud, and he had the Force. But he didn't bother to look up from whatever project he occupied himself with until then—and when he did, he knew where the Ark Angel's holocams were on her front. He'd fixed them enough times. Aphra flinched when, through the feed, he looked her straight in the eye.
Then he looked away. His mouth moved in Geonosian clicks and squeals, and his posse of droids followed him off again. Aphra turned the camera to track them, but they seemed to be wandering aimlessly into the desert. Setting the holocam to stay on their tail, she used the binocs to get a now uninterrupted view of the corpse.
It looked dead. For how long, she couldn't tell: sand sucked the moisture out of bodies and could preserve them for years after death, long after the bacteria in their stomach should have started to consume them. But there didn't seem to be any change from what Luke had been doing.
She glanced back at the feed. He and his droids were walking aimlessly in the desert still—no, towards another corpse. She could see its knees just poking above the sand on the horizon. Maybe if they did it again, she'd have a better look this time.
But one last glance back at the previous corpse made her pause.
Its arms twitched. The head, heavy on its shoulders, turned one way, then the next, as if clearing a crick in its neck. Its wings were face down in the sand, but they fluttered too. Its legs began to work, then its arms caught up: it heaved itself to its feet and walked.
It walked towards Luke.
Aphra's heart thudded in her ears. There were more black spots below her in the sand, moving. She adjusted the holocam to zoom in on them: they were corpses, too. Ambulating corpses. They swayed uneasily, unsteady on feet long dead and senseless, but they moved.
An entire field of the dead followed Luke across the desert, mindless and willing.
She put down the binocs.
What new Geonosian hell was this supposed to be?
The Ark Angel was still following her coded trajectory. By now, they were almost out of sight of the resurrection party and their Jedi messiah. It didn't matter. It didn't matter that she didn't know what any of this meant, or how it worked, or what it implied for her chances of survival in the near future.
The Ark Angel docked in low orbit. A cloud passed between them and Geonosis. It was sorely welcome.
Worrying about undead bugs was counterproductive when Aphra had something more specific to worry about: her own skin. She hadn't risked that whole showdown with Luke and his loyal battle droids just to ignore the spoils. The moment the Ark Angel stopped moving, and Aphra was no longer needed in the cockpit, she headed to the backroom for some much-needed medical attention.
She grabbed Luke's bag from where she'd flung it to the side upon entry and sat down on the workbench next to the dejarik-table-turned-second-workbench. Luke's bag was heavy—for a moment, she marvelled at the fact he'd carried it so far and not complained, before she stopped caring—and she had to heave it onto the table. A quick untie of the knots, and its contents spilled out across the table.
They were not the contents she'd told him to pack.
There were his tools. She'd recognise them anywhere; she'd stolen them enough times. There were the food rations! Good to know she had more of them, now. She was sure that if the queen wanted to keep Luke alive, she'd find alternative ways of feeding him, and resolutely did not think about what those alternate ways of feeding him might be. He had some old books stuck in there, for some reason, and there! There was the medpack. She reached for it.
It was covered in yellow slime.
She grimaced, retracting her hand. The slime smelt of rot and decay, with a hint of mucus. She presumed it came from the other items in this pack that she had definitely not asked Luke to pack.
Eggs.
Yellow-green eggs, blemished, and spherical. They were big enough for her to cradle in both her hands, should for some insane reason she felt inclined. She didn't.
The colour clicked in her head, and she reached for the bag to peer closer inside. That was what Luke had been holding, when she'd seen him briefly through the binocs. Eggs. What did eggs have to do with—
"Agh!"
A worm, as thick as her pointer finger and twice as long, slithered out of the pack to regard her with its eyeless head. She stared at it.
Then her hand flashed out, grabbed it, and launched it at the floor. It hardly had time to orient itself before her boot came down on it.
"Ew! Ew! Ew!"
When she looked at the bottom of her boot, all that was left of the worm was a yellow, pulpy mess.
But a loud crack rang through the room. Her gaze fell on one of the other eggs—there were dozens of them scattered over the table by now, oh stars—and the long, thin crack that had appeared in it. As she watched, it widened. Then another crack criss-crossed it. The eggshell started to strain as something pushed, and pushed, something bright and yellow-green from what she could see through the cracks…
"This is not happening," Aphra decided.
The crunch of the eggs in the trash compactor was sickening but also thoroughly satisfying.
Getting the yellow slime—from the inside of the egg that had hatched, presumably—off the medpack was harder, but it was a worthy goal. Once she'd dumped more tissues into the waste disposal than she had the last ten times she was sick combined, she unzipped the medpack and groped around for the bacta patches. There were so many! Luke kept it so well-stocked! She could weep.
She almost did weep when she rolled up her shirt, wiped and rubbed her skin with a disinfectant tissue, then slapped the bacta patch on it. It was a big one and especially gooey: it stretched from her ribs to her hip and wrapped her in a cool, soothing embrace. There were bandages in the medpack as well. She bound the bacta patch to her torso with those, then rolled down her shirt again.
It might be a good idea to change it, actually. It stunk.
When she got back from her cabin, a crisp white shirt draped loosely over her trousers and only slightly showing the bulge from her bandages, her eyes landed on the bag again. Its contents were still spilled over the table.
Her fingers twitched. "Don't," she scolded them. She shouldn't. Probably.
Actually? Nah. Luke lived with a rogue archaeologist. He knew to expect some digging.
The books were what intrigued her at first. It wasn't like she didn't know how to use them—she was an archaeologist—but the fact they were heavy, dusty, and made out of real flimsi? With a thick leather cover to protect it? She really wanted to know how Luke had got hold of these.
After she flipped it open, the first page read, The Journals of Ben Kenobi.
Oooh. Exciting. She had no idea who that was.
It was a long time she spent sitting there reading it. After about ten minutes, she got the picture: a miserable old Jedi survivor crouching in the desert, watching over the kid of his dead best friend, crying every night and writing every thought and feeling of his into the page. It was kinda cute, how much effort he put into looking after Luke—he fought a krayt dragon to protect him? That was dedication—and she could see why Luke still cared. But most of this stuff? Whiny bantha shit.
Other than the stuff about the Jedi.
Not the stuff about the fall of the Jedi. Aphra didn't care about that. Her mother was long dead, but she remembered what she'd always said—there were no goodies or baddies. Just whoever was on top right now. The Jedi had been knocked off their pedestal and that was that, no matter what Aphra's dad thought about it.
She paused, her hand on the page. Luke's dad had been a Jedi, she noticed. Luke had never known him. He'd died in the Purges.
No wonder he'd been a bit snappy about how Aphra treated her living father. Even if he had no right to be.
She sighed, wrinkling her nose. The pages were also filled with sketches for Jedi training: meditation poses, lightsaber katas, long spiels and winding explanations about the Force that made no sense. And Aphra knew about the Force. In an academic way, where she could name every significant Force sect that had existed since the formation of the Old Republic and take a guess at what the hell the difference between them was meant to be, but who cared enough to listen to that? The Force was a magic power that Vader used to strangle people with. End of.
But Luke had been working hard to master it.
He'd annotated Kenobi's journals—with what writing implement she had no idea, because she certainly didn't have any pencils on her ship. The graphite got into the wiring.
What does this grip look like? Maybe my hands are too small for the hilt…?
Can't find the 'peace' he keeps writing about.
What does this even mean?
He'd written that last sentence a lot. Aphra snorted. She couldn't blame him. Maybe she should put him in touch with her dad if he was this desperate.
A cold pit sunk into Aphra's stomach.
No. Aphra would not put Luke in touch with her dad. Vader was on his way to seize Luke, and Vader executed wannabe Jedi. Or worse.
Like my father, Luke had written in some places. Next to some nonsense passage about fear, in one case. I need to be brave and good. Like my father.
There wasn't anything she could do for Luke. Just as Luke hadn't been able to do for Kenobi, it seemed. One tiny annotation, scratched in his grief below a particularly dense cloud of confused scribblings, was a sentiment that the whole journal seemed to ring with:
What am I supposed to do now that he's gone?
Aphra gritted her teeth. She thought of the stormtrooper squad leader who'd dug her out of the ditch on Arbiflux and told her that everything was gonna be alright. They were taking her back to her father—the father her mother had spirited her away from.
Because her mother was dead.
Her eyesight blurred. When she blinked it clear again, she frowned. The handwriting that little note was written in, on a second look, wasn't Luke's. It was a close match, but the isk had a longer loop on it, and the wesk much wider. Luke's wesks were almost squares, while the wesk in what was twice as wide as it was tall.
This was a note from Ben Kenobi.
This was a note about Anakin Skywalker.
She slammed the journal shut. Grief wasn't her thing. She liked looting more.
Luke's comlink, her next target, was useless for that, though. He had a passcode on it, of course; he wasn't a total idiot. He almost wasn't an idiot at all: it took her nearly ten minutes to circumvent the passcode and unlock it.
He didn't have many messages. The only three people he'd contacted since he'd left Tatooine, it seemed, were Aphra, a Leia, and a Bail. She didn't bother looking at his messages to her, but Leia had sent him two messages he hadn't read yet.
Something leapt in Aphra's chest. She hadn't realised that Luke knew anyone other than her, seeing as he was a fugitive and all. If there was someone he was in regular contact with, perhaps someone would notice he was missing and choose to act.
When she opened the messages, her heart sank again. The messages from the last thirty hours, more or less, read:
Luke? Is something wrong?
Answer me.
If you're alive, you won't be for long if you don't answer me.
I felt something go wrong.
And then:
I'm fine.
Leia clearly didn't believe it. Are you sure?
Something happened, but I'm fine now. I promise.
The messages from Luke were only about twelve hours old. He hadn't sent them—the hivemind had.
Alright… Leia had replied. And then: I trust you, Luke.
Aphra flexed her fingers, ready to type out—something. She didn't know. But common sense won out. Vader was on his way, and she had better be prepared for that. Instead, she did a bit more snooping through their conversation.
And wow. Luke had some secrets. Secrets he'd actually been not-too-bad at keeping. A sister. A friend (that was the most surprising part, to be honest). An entire support network of a family who seemed perfectly happy to take him in as soon as he had the good sense to ditch that dastardly Doctor Aphra. She wasn't sure to be stung or warmed by it.
It wasn't until she opened up his messages to Bail that she figured out who exactly Bail was. She wasn't exactly up to date on the politics of the Empire or the Senate, but why the hell was Luke in contact with the Princess of Alderaan?
More importantly: why was he still with Aphra, if he had allies of that stature?
It wasn't a jump from there to figure out the last few things Luke had been hiding from her.
He was a Rebel. Damn idealistic fool—it fit him. That was why he'd been so interested in figuring out why the Empire would wipe out the Geonosians? Because his sister—the Princess of Alderaan—had asked him to?
Luke clearly hadn't spent enough time with Aphra. Why hadn't he at least negotiated to be paid for that?
This was the sort of information Vader would love to have. Evidence of Rebel collusion by a prominent senator? More Jedi drama? Another person for him to murder? It'd make his day.
She sighed, weighing the comlink in her hand like it was a sandsnake. Then she put it back in the bag and shut the bag, tightly. If it was a sandsnake, it would suffocate in there, with any luck.
It would still be a few hours until Vader got here. The best thing she could do was get some rest, let the bacta do its work on her injury, and let her brain rest.
Vader arrived ten standard hours later.
Aphra was thankfully already awake, though barely: she had crawled into her bunk and, overcome with the luxury of it, slept for nine hours and forty-five minutes. She was still making herself a drink and some food when her comm chimed, and she raced to answer it.
It was Vader. She smiled grimly, sent him her exact location in orbit, then went to brush her hair.
He'd come in that fancy silver ship of his—the Nubian one, all smooth sides and round edges. Aphra knew Vader had made some modifications to her himself, so she was a lot tougher than she looked, but she still looked at her and ran the maths on how many credits she would be worth on the black market somewhat dubiously. If she found the right collector? Maybe. She was gorgeous. But gorgeous in the same way a pinned butterfly, or a glass sculpture, or a kind queen was gorgeous. Beauty didn't help anyone except the person selling it.
Their airlocks locked into place, and Vader strode across the gap between them, straight into the Ark Angel. The moment he entered the ship, he stiffened, turning his helmet to look all around the living quarters. Aphra, jacket buttoned unevenly and hair still rife with knots in her haste to look presentable, stood there nervously, a cup of caf in her hand.
"Welcome, Lord Vader!" she said chirpily. This was the first time she'd seen him in person since… since that first time after she'd met Luke. When he'd nearly killed her.
This was gonna go great.
"I've put together a briefing on what the situation's like on Geonosis," she continued. She hadn't—not thoroughly, at least—but she'd thought about it, which meant she'd put it together in her head. "It's not a convenient trip, and there were a lot of unforeseen dangers that personally, I think should be reflected in the payment—"
"The boy lived on this ship with you?" Vader asked.
Aphra froze, closed her mouth, then opened it again. "Yes," she said. "As I mentioned before, he stowed away on my ship on Tatooine. Would've spaced him if he hadn't been so blasted persuasive, but he's a good kid, and he's helped me out a lot these last six months. I told you about the kid I'd taken on as an assistant, right?"
"The one you do not pay."
"Yeah." Why did Vader remember that, of all things? "He helped me out on a lot of the missions you sent me on—the Son-tuul Pride mission, the excursion to Quarantine World III, the trip to Naboo—"
For the first time, he looked at her directly, instead of staring around the Ark Angel. "He assisted you in interrogating Commodex Tahn?"
"Ah… no. You gave me classified information, and I respected that! Luke flew the ship to the other side of Naboo to distract the local authorities while I got the info about Amidala's surviving child out of him."
He turned away from her and walked to the other end of the living quarters, where the doors to the two bunkrooms sat in the wall. After a moment of looking between them, he stopped in front of Luke's. "He is a Jedi," he said. It would have been almost conversational, if the concept of Darth Vader having a casual conversation wasn't delusional.
Aphra didn't respond. That wasn't a question, so she didn't have to!
Until Vader asked, "Did you know?"
She swallowed. "I figured it out eventually," she said. Sana's dig notes sat on the shelf in her peripheral vision; she resolutely didn't look at them. Sana didn't matter. Luke didn't matter. "But he didn't know that I knew, y'know?"
"You never saw fit to mention this?"
Well, no, because Vader would have killed him. And Luke was useful—his magic powers had got them out of so much trouble, whether or not he was any good with them—and Aphra didn't like to waste a good weapon.
She said nothing. Vader stepped towards the door to Luke's bunkroom. It hissed open abruptly; Aphra wondered if she was right in thinking that he flinched when it did. No matter. Vader stepped inside anyway, and the door hissed shut behind him.
Aphra took another sip of her caf.
When a few more minutes had passed, she took another.
She had almost drained the whole cup and was feeling much perkier when he stepped out again, fists clenched. Aphra had to wonder what he'd even found in there. Luke had limited possessions. More magical stuff?
"Tell me everything that has occurred since you landed on this planet, Aphra," he said, a warning in his tone.
Aphra nodded and sat down at the workbench. Vader didn't sit down: he hooked his thumbs into his belt and hovered menacingly, his enormous height casting a long shadow over her.
But she resolutely didn't look at him or acknowledge that. Aphra just did what she did best: she started talking.
"…I don't know what the mind control had him doing last I saw him, though," she said. "I have footage, but—"
"Describe it to me again. And retrieve this footage."
"He and the droids were marching about the desert. Must've been seriously hot and seriously tiring, all that sand, but he didn't seem bothered. He was carrying eggs like"—she waved her hand to the trash compactor—"the ones I found in the bag. I'd guess he was using the bag to carry them before I stole it. I don't know—"
"He is resurrecting the dead," Vader said.
Aphra paused, waited for him to elaborate, and rolled her eyes when he didn't. "Can you explain that further, please?"
Before she could really process the fact that she'd just sassed Darth Vader, thankfully, Vader just answered her. "I have seen this before. The Geonosian queen wields enormous power over her people. She lays eggs, from which hatch worms—"
"Larval Geonosians." Aphra nodded. "Like I said, a couple of them tried to eat Luke."
"And now they have infected him instead." His mask turned towards her, and he didn't need to tell her for her to get the impression that she should shut up and let him speak. "We did not perform extensive study on these worms, though my companion wished to." A heavy pause. Aphra wondered who that companion could have been. "After entering the brain via various orifices—ideally the nose or the mouth—they seize control of the organism through unknown means. This works especially for Geonosians, but it extends to many other species."
He stared into space again. Aphra tapped her foot—then stopped. He could sense her impatience. No need to get aggressive with it. Then he might get aggressive with her.
"The queen who reigned during the Clone Wars attempted to use this to control the invaders and induct them into her empire. She captured a Jedi, intending to infect her, and attempted to infect two more Jedi. Even after she died, her consciousness was preserved in the worms and was able to infect the clone troopers on a supply transport, as well as one of the Jedi padawans leading it. They seized control of the ship, and it was only the action and quick thinking of my— of another padawan that prevented the infection from spreading farther through the GAR."
GAR. Grand Army of the Republic. It was a tiny slip-up—an acronym no one used nowadays, just referring to it as the clone army—but she noticed it.
There was a lot of stuff to notice here, in fact. Vader had clearly dealt with the Geonosians before—that, at least, he'd admitted to—and that made sense if he was formerly a Jedi who'd jumped ship to the Sith the moment he realised they were crashing. That he'd been a Jedi was only a rumour, though, and it was always good to have evidence for those. And the padawan who'd stopped the outbreak? My— the other padawan. Vader had trained a Jedi. What deliciously useful bits of knowledge to use later.
"How did she prevent the outbreak?" Aphra asked. "Is there a way to remove the worm from the host?"
"Yes, I can rescue Luke," Vader said. Which wasn't what Aphra had been asking, but alright. Jump to conclusions. "The worms are highly sensitive to cold. The padawan ruptured the coolant systems on the ship. When the temperature plummeted, the worms sought to escape, first driving their hosts to fix the situation and, if that fails, abandoning the host to what they presume will be a cold death in order to escape."
"They're sensitive to heat too. When they were eating Luke, he got rid of them by burning them—and himself—with a lightsaber."
Vader went very still at that for a few moments. Aphra kept talking. "It makes sense. They're sheltered far below ground, right? The habitats are pretty warm, with good airflow, and they're probably built to regulate temperature well, since desert temperatures swing between the extremes. A lot of species' young have to be raised underground at first because they're vulnerable to their specific environment. I bet that's why they built the catacombs in the first place—"
"It does not matter. Once they have left their hosts, then they can be squashed."
He said squashed so casually. Like they really were just bugs to him, instead of one of the most fascinating biological weapons Aphra had ever encountered.
"What I don't get," she said, "is why they take hosts at all."
"That is irrelevant."
"Think about it. Parasitic mind control species? Sure. I've run into Abersyn symbiotes before—"
"Those are outlawed by the Empire on penalty of death."
"—and I've always reported them perfectly legally and had them incinerated," she added quickly. "On penalty of death and societal collapse and total loss of your bodily autonomy. But they're parasites. They're motivated to seize control of sentient gentlebeings' brainstems because feeding on other organisms is how they survive. It just so happens that the way they do that is that the host with the strongest will gains the ability to control everyone else. But the parasites here are larval Geonosians. They'll grow into horrid big bugs like the corpses out there, like the queen herself. They don't need hosts to survive. Why would they send their babies to infect people?"
"Their life cycles, Aphra," Vader said, "are both alien and utterly irrelevant to us. They are a rotten species, just as their planet is rotten to the core."
He'd said that before. She put her hands up. "Alright, alright. I'm just curious. Tell me about the corpses, instead."
"The corpses?"
"If Luke's already infected, what was he doing with the eggs and the corpses?" She lit up. "Oh—if they care so little about their young that they use them as mind control machines, do you reckon they eat their own species? Seems unhygienic with dead bodies, but… are they a bona-fide example of a cannibalistic species? I did a paper on species like that in my undergrad, and—"
"Silence. I have already told you what Luke was doing."
Aphra's chattering cut off. She paused—and her insides chilled. "You said he was resurrecting them."
"The hivemind extends its influence beyond the threshold of death. These worms can still control their hosts' minds when the hosts are dead. They puppeteer their corpses in service to their queen."
"So." Aphra put her hands on her hips. "Luke's making a zombie army?"
"Yes."
Aphra struggled to think of something to say. Awesome didn't seem like a reaction Vader would appreciate.
She tried again. "Luke's making a zombie army, for the queen who already has a droid army, for her to… what? Rebuild her empire?"
"Rebuild her empire," Vader agreed. "Establish her dominance. We have taken all from her. She will want revenge." He scoffed. "And it would be an inconvenience to crush her again."
"The Geonosians—"
"Are dead. We sterilised this planet. If we missed this queen, that does not matter. She cannot reproduce alone, or she would have already. All that is left to her is to recreate her hellish species through corpses and droids and inflict her suffering upon Imperial citizens."
So, she had absolutely nothing to lose.
Wonderful. That was exactly the type of enemy Aphra liked to make. That never went badly at all.
"So, what's the plan, Boss?" she asked. "We gotta take her down and get Luke back. We can't just waltz in there, nab him, then orbitally bombard the planet."
"Perhaps you cannot. That is what I intend to do."
Oh. Aphra swallowed. "Uh—through the zombie army Luke's raising?"
"Yes."
"And the droid army she's already made and gets bigger and tougher and scarier—I should know, I've fought them—by the minute?"
"Yes."
"Without killing—or, harming, sorry—Luke, who's mind controlled and will definitely try to stop us?"
"We will not be harming Luke," Vader informed her. Aphra glanced down when she heard a tiiiiny squeak. Leather against leather. Vader was clenching his fists.
Interesting.
"Of course not, my lord!" she chirped. "Do you have a way to get him out—"
"My ship contains a temperature-controlled pod. There, I will lower the temperature until the worm flees his body and dies."
"Right." She nodded extra vigorously. "And then once we've got him away, we can orbitally bombard—"
"We will not."
Alright. Finally. He was elaborating on his plan.
She leaned back in her seat, resisting the urge to put her feet up on the workbench. "We can't?"
Vader almost seemed to fidget, then. "Orbital bombardment as a course of action comes attended with a great deal of…"
Ohhhh. This, Aphra understood.
"…paperwork."
"I get that," she sympathised. "All these bureaucrats whining about how that could have had important artefacts there and what about the scientific research you just destroyed and that was a productive mine you blew up!"
"At present, the Empire has no need of more mines," Vader growled, with surprising intensity.
Aphra raised her eyebrows and filed that away for later.
"But that may not be true for the future," he allowed. "We have far more selective methods of exterminating pests."
"Yeah! How'd you do it the first time, anyway?" She wriggled her fingers in excitement, curling them around an imaginary trigger. "Bombs? Poison? Poison bombs?"
"Both."
She grinned. "Both? Man, that must've hit 'em hard."
"They were used interchangeably, until my assault team were confident there were none left alive."
Good to know. Very good to know. If they were gonna do that again, Aphra would have the chance to nab some of those for herself…
"But we have no need for them, this time." Aphra huffed her disappointment. "The queen is the only living Geonosian. Other than the… things."
"Larvae."
"And she does not leave the catacombs. The only way to confidently destroy her and her perverse hive is to bury them."
Aphra nodded but raised her finger in a question. "The orbital bombardment…?"
"Is not necessary. You will plant charges to the same effect. They will detonate and destroy the catacombs. The queen and her armies will be crushed. Luke will have been retrieved and freed from her influence. The Geonosian problem will be no more." He paused, and added, "After you have retrieved the Death Star plans. Do not lose sight of why I sent you here to begin with."
The Death Star plans. The Death Star plans whose whereabouts she had no idea of. She wasn't even convinced the Geonosians had a physical copy—that the queen hadn't been lying to her, just to be cruel.
The Death Star plans.
Right. Aphra swallowed.
Charges.
Catacombs.
Aphra, running around in the dark and planting them, while Vader went off after Luke.
Time running out—the tunnels collapsing around her—Vader, who she'd already established did not care one bit about her or her life, taking off with Luke instead of her—
She was going to figure out what was going on here. Why Vader wanted Luke so badly. Who he was—Vader, that was, but also Luke, the mysterious farm kid watched over by Jedi. How to exploit them both.
It was increasingly clear that she would have to, if she wanted to survive.
"Sounds great," she said. "When do we start?"
We work hard at all hours of the day at what we do, and Wormie is no exception. Mistakes have already been overridden and forgotten: what we do next is more important. What we do next will determine the fate of our people.
Wormie and our droids march out again, into the cruel outdoors, where the sun beats upon us ever harsher and radiation lingers on our tongues. We have never made a habit of existing outside of our hives—our only exception would be for the arena, for the games we put on, for only outside can death rain down in such great volumes and feed the new life below. Otherwise, we left the safety of our hives only for the sacred task of building. No doubt this meant we left it often, but it was a necessity, not an indulgence. We are highly aware of what kills us. We are highly aware of how to stay alive.
We are highly aware that every day, such a task grows more difficult.
The fallen flesh of our former drones stains the outdoors, and the outdoors has been especially cruel to it. Our brethren struggle to walk when we slither inside them, their legs withered and frayed, their minds empty of all but sand and sunlight. But they walk, nonetheless. After Wormie kneels, lays our hands on them, and determines they will not poison us at the very heart, they stagger with every strength they have inside them back to the darkness from which we all were born.
We see horrible things, when Wormie lays our hands on their ruined bodies. The deaths of our thousand brethren ring ever clearer than they did all those years ago, intensified and intoxicating with the strength of Wormie's power. Sand erupts around us, smothering us, burying us. Chunks of our own hives fracture and shatter on our heads, sending us to the ground in pieces. Shrapnel shrieks into our soft appendages, and our lifeblood drenches the world. Poison chokes our airways and rots our veins—but from these bodies, Wormie snatches our hands back, with grief ringing in our chest. We desecrate these bodies in a pale imitation of the ruin they should have had the honour of receiving and leave them there. With good fortune, they will rot here under the unkind sun.
But many of ours, we recover. Broken legs, we splint; cracked skulls are no concern; severed wings are to be mourned but serve no hindrance on the route. If Wormie can make it here, so can the flightless dead. We walk them home in a long trail, and they—we—lift each other when they—we—fall.
Do you see how flexible the lines between the living and the dead truly are?
We have worked for hours, and we have worked excellently. The exhaustion in Wormie's body floods through us all. It is time to rest. There are thousands of us still out there, still waiting for the third life just as Wormie holds children that yearn for the first, and we who drive the staggering dead yearn for the second.
Thousands will not be recovered in a day. Nor a week. Nor even a year. But we will keep working, and we will live on.
The droids help Wormie back, for with a body so tired, we falter at the long trek. They fly us home, into the cool darkness that we call safety, and here we can rest before the operation we anticipate so greedily.
Those of our dead whose wings have been lost can walk home, but walking is slow and cumbersome where it is not required. Wormie, the first of our new hive, the speaker for the past and the enabler of our future, cannot fly at all.
That is why, while we bring our dead to the third life they were always promised, Queen Karina has worked with the droids on wings. Broader and wider than a biological Geonosians', for Wormie's human body is dense and poorly designed, but nothing is so poorly designed that we cannot redesign it. Wings like our droids', but modified to connect with muscle, bone, and instinct, to reach back through forgotten evolutionary pathways to find the gene sequences lurking in Wormie's cells that remember what it is to soar.
Wormie, even before becoming one of us, has remembered this feeling and longed for this for as long as he lived. His other name, his former name, promises that much.
But we do not use the name Skywalker. Wormie's sire was a monster; Wormie's sire caused us much of the pain Wormie now mends. We do not dishonour Wormie by perpetuating a name he shares with the invader who once described our world as rotten to the core.
But the past is only relevant when we wish it to be. It is only relevant when we remember it. There are other questions we would ask, now.
Does Wormie want to fly?
Yes. We do.
So, we rest. We sleep for some time, while our droids tell us that the invader has flown off the planet and parked herself above us, to watch and wait like an eye. We rest Wormie's body for the trial ahead. Our previous Jedi—a healer, a kind soul, from so long ago—gave us the knowledge of how to heal with the Force, and Wormie does this too. It will be useful, once the surgery is complete.
Wormie lies beneath the lights and the droids' scalpels happily, trustingly, knowing the orders we gave and what we wish to do. The scalpel divides skin from skin, muscle from muscle, before from after. Wormie is being remade.
Pain drills through us all. Wormie screams with a thousand voices—all of us, reaching back in a long, unflinching chain of memory, scream with him. Muscles thread and knot around the intrusion in our backs; metal grinds against flesh; nerves shriek in protest to the mind, the mind, the hivemind of which all of us are a part, and we share in the suffering of this transformation, just as we share in the suffering of all transformations.
Wormie has enabled dozens of us to begin the first life. The second life. The third life. This is Wormie's next life.
We embrace the pain. We are intimately familiar with pain. It is what reminds us that this is life, and not yet death.
